One problem experienced during orthodontic treatment is the residual crowding of adjacent teeth due to insufficient interproximal reduction (IPR). The ability to resolve the crowding of teeth to create sufficient space and IPR during treatment is an important issue in the growing field of computational orthodontics. To create such spacing, stripping and/or other trimming processes are most often utilized, but the determination of such stripping and trimming can be very difficult.
For example, clinicians generally do not know in what particular region or area to strip a particular tooth if the stripping is needed. Clinicians generally do not know where the stripping region is located as current quantifying collision functions only output a collision amount. Such processes for determining a stripping region are reactive in nature, rather predicative. Such limitations often mislead the clinician to strip or trim more from a tooth than is necessary, thus resulting in gaps occurring between two neighboring teeth after treatment. Moreover, such limitations may mislead the clinician to strip or trim less from a tooth than is necessary, and/or strip or trim in the wrong region, thus resulting in insufficient space is generated, which hinders tooth to be moved to its target position. In addition, after stripping of the tooth, the stripped IPR tooth geometry cannot be readily visualized in the virtual treatment. Moreover, after such stripping, a clinician cannot be adequately assured whether a stripped or trimmed tooth has sufficient spacing or is still in collision with adjacent teeth, making further adjustment difficult. Since the stripped geometry for the teeth is not adequately represented, the incorrect computation of the collision between teeth during treatment results.